Brink: First Impressions

Thanks to some awe­some friends of mine I got a copy of Brink on pre-order and got to sit down and play it last night. Being that I haven’t been able to play all of the way through it I thought I would give my ini­tial impres­sions of the game.
Before I begin I want to clar­i­fy what Brink is. Before I was gift­ed this game I had absolute­ly no idea what it was or what the point of the game was. Brink attempts to be a com­bi­na­tion of sev­er­al games. First and fore­most Brink bears sim­i­lar­i­ties to Team Fortress 2 and then tries to com­bine it with the likes of Bor­der­lands. There are even some Call of Dutyesq ele­ments in the form of weapon unlock­ing and mod­i­fi­ca­tions and all of this comes with­out the annoy­ing TF2 hats.
I’m sure by now most of you have read the reviews at major gam­ing out­lets such as IGN, Kotaku and Gamespot cit­ing their gripes with the game. In fact, IGN says “An Exer­cise in need­less rep­e­ti­tion” and I have to say that I actu­al­ly agree with these reviews.
My biggest com­plaint so far is the lack of a true sin­gle play­er ele­ment. I mean, there are sin­gle play ele­ments, but they aren’t real­ly sin­gle play­er as they more close­ly resem­bles a Quake 3 are­na sin­gle play­er death match but aside from the cin­e­mat­ic intro it does­n’t appear to fol­low any sort of plot­line. This is more of a per­son­al pref­er­ence, but I hate that style of sin­gle play­er. I pre­fer a true sin­gle play­er expe­ri­ence that is sep­a­rate from the mul­ti-play­er com­po­nent. Hav­ing said that I think co-op is a fan­tas­tic idea and should be incor­po­rat­ed in more games but I don’t think you should have to be online to play a sin­gle play­er game. Brink forces this online com­po­nent upon you and as we have seen in the past this mod­el does­n’t work well.
I’ll have a final opin­ion when I play through the rest of the game but so far it looks like Brink still needs a bit of work before it’s going to be able to con­tend with the oth­er big play­ers out there.

5 comments

Algorind - May 11, 2011 2:09 pm

The good: run­ning full sprint down a hall­way, jump­ing to catch the rail of a cat­walk and clam­ber­ing over to avoid a hail of bul­lets, only to leap down the oth­er side of the rail­ing into a pow­er­slide that ends with your shot­gun in the crotch of an ene­my.
Seri­ous­ly.
The bad: total lack of any com­pelling rea­son to play sin­gle-play­er. Total lack of any real dif­fer­ence in most of the ‘unlock­able’ weapons. Total lack of dif­fer­ences in playstyle between class­es. Whether you’re a sol­dier or a medic, game­play feels pret­ty much the same with the excep­tion of your spe­cial abil­i­ty. Sure there are some unlock­able abil­i­ties for each class that are pret­ty cool, but sev­er­al times I’ve for­got­ten what class I was play­ing in the mid­dle of a fight, sim­ply because they all play so sim­i­lar­ly.
That being said, do I like the game? Yeah, I do. I think it could be a real­ly, real­ly fun game to play IF you can get a serv­er with some reg­u­lars that are will­ing to work togeth­er and be semi-com­pet­i­tive.

I just fin­ished the secu­ri­ty sto­ry line and it was super short, 5hrs to fin­ish it and thats with hav­ing a mis­sion that i had to play like 5 times. Basi­cal­ly Brink is an objec­tive based mul­ti play­er game with no real sub­stance to it, the sto­ry is short and lack­ing and resem­bles a round of team death match more than any­thing. Its a game that should have been released at $20-$25 as an arcade game. Dont get me wrong I do like the game, its actu­al­ly fun to play once you real­ize what it is and can get passed the ini­tial pre­con­cep­tions, but its not worth $50/$60 and sin­gles out the com­mu­ni­ty with­out net or with a slow con­nec­tion. Grant­ed most of the gamer com­mu­ni­ty is gonna have a suf­fi­cient con­nec­tion how­ev­er not every­one is into online gam­ing or can afford it. so although I do like the game, the bot­tom line is that the game isnt worth the $50 price tag, and sim­ply fails in the sin­gle play­er cam­paign depart­ment. And hav­ing said that it is a very unique game with great mechan­ics and I hope to see more games using the same kind of sys­tem in the future, but with an actu­al sin­gle play­er mode and online mul­ti sep­a­rate from each oth­er and not com­bined

Good review.
I’ve been play­ing Brink for the last two nights, and while I agree with what you’re say­ing, I’m still hav­ing fun. The game play is dif­fer­ent, and it’s fun. The sto­ry could have been expand­ed on a lot more than it was and yes, true sin­gle play­er would have been nice.
I com­plete­ly agree on the price tag, this game does not have the con­tent to be val­ued at $50-$60. That and the hor­rid FPS I’m get­ting in game. pret­ty much aver­ag­ing 30, which is playable, but annoy­ing.

So I have con­tin­ued to play Brink off and on since it was released. Hon­est­ly if they could just fix the hor­rid FPS issues that ATI/AMD GPU users are hav­ing it would go a long way to mak­ing it more enjoy­able. As it stands it will prob­a­bly be a game I play when I’m bored with what­ev­er I nor­mal­ly play.
Also that’s the 5th post for the con­test, suck it tre­bek!